Radio show retracts fabricated Apple factory expose

Public radio program “This American Life” has issued a retraction for its most popular podcast episode in history, a Mac fanboy and storyteller’s investigation inside Apple factories in Shenzhen, China.

Host Ira Glass announced today that Mike Daisey fabricated significant parts of the episode “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” It aired on January 6 and was downloaded 888,000 times, inspiring a New York Times series with its claims of dangerous working conditions and underage workers at the facilities for Apple supplier Foxconn.

“Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake,” Glass wrote.

A reporter at a fellow American Public Media program discovered that Daisey’s own translator could not corroborate with the story Daisey told, based on his stage show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about meeting underage workers outside a factory and showing off his iPad to a man who injured his hand at an iPad factory.

“In our original broadcast, we fact checked all the things that Daisey said about Apple’s operations in China,” says Glass, “and those parts of his story were true, except for the underage workers, who are rare. We reported that discrepancy in the original show. But with this week’s broadcast, we’re letting the audience know that too many of the details about the people he says he met are in dispute for us to stand by the story. I suspect that many things that Mike Daisey claims to have experienced personally did not actually happen, but listeners can judge for themselves.”

This week’s episode will chronicle the retraction with an interview from Daisey about why he misled a journalistic organization with a dramatized “theatrical” account of Apple factory conditions. Rather than coming out on Sunday, it’s going up immediately, today… which happens to be the same day as the release of the new iPad.

“It was completely wrong for me to have it on your show,” Daisey says to Glass in the interview, “and that’s something I deeply regret.” He also expressed his regret to “the people who are listening, the audience of This American Life, who know that it is a journalism enterprise, if they feel betrayed.”